The Many-Coloured Land Read online

  Listen to the anomalies! Soft gibberings and puerile thrusts. Other unhuman minds, unaugmented by torcs, perhaps genuinely operant? What? Who? Where? Data inconclusive, but there are many. Listen to faint traceries of dread-patterns and pain-patterns and resignation-loss-patterns coming from God knew where or what. Shrink back. Press past them and beyond, listening. Listening.

  That! A fleeting contact from the north that winks out in a spasm of apprehension as soon as you touch it. Tanu? Enhanced human far-speaker? Call out, but receive no response. Project friendship and need, but hear no answer . . . Perhaps you imagined it after all.

  Listen afar, afar. Sound the entire Exile world. Are any of you here, sisters and brothers of the mind? Do any farsense in the uniquely human mode that the exotics cannot know? Answer Elizabeth Orme farspeaker redactor searcher hoper prayer! Answer . . .

  Planet aureole. Emanations of lower life-forms. Mental whispers from normal humanity. The jabber of the Tanu and their torced minions. An ambiguous murmur from the other side of the world, evanescent as a remembered dream. It is real or reverberate? Imagination or reality? Track it, lose it. Hover despairingly and know that it never was. The Earth is mute.

  Go out beyond the world-halo and perceive the diapason roar of the hidden sun and the thinner arpeggios of stars near and distant, tingling with their own planets and life. No meta-psychic humanity? Then call to the ancient-in-your-day Lylmik race, frail artisans of mental prodigies . . . but they do not yet exist. Call to the Krondaku, brothers-mental despite their fearsome bodies . . . but they, too, are a race still in embryo, as are the Gi, the Poltroyans, and the rude Simbiari. The living universe is uncoadunate, mind still chained to matter. The Milieu is in its childhood and Blessed Diamond Mask unborn. There is no one to answer.

  Elizabeth withdrew.

  Her eyes beheld her own hands, the diamond ring symbolic of her profession faintly luminous, mocking. Banal mental images lapped and splattered her. The wide-open subvocalization of the soldier Billy, brooding over the ageing but available charms of a female tavern keeper at a place called Roniah. The other guard, Seung Kyu, preoccupied with a wager he plans to make upon some contest, the outcome of which might now be modified by the participation of Stein. The captal broadcasting pain waves from a boil in his armpit that is aggravated by the bronze breastplate of his light armor. Stein seemingly asleep calmed by his gray torc. Aiken and the woman named Sukey weaving a crude but effective screen over some mental shenanigans. Creyn now deep in verbal conversation with the anthropologist, discussing the evolution of Tanu society since the opening of the time-portal.

  Elizabeth wove a shield behind which she could mourn, impervious as the diamond of her future patron saint. And when it was finished she let the bitter sorrow and rage blaze up. She wept for the irony of having fled from loneliness and bereavement, only to encounter it transformed and fresh. Cocooned, wrapped in the fire of loss, she drifted. Her face was as tranquil as that of a statue in the bright light of the Pliocene stars, her mind as inaccessible as they.

  ". . . the Ship had no way of knowing that this sun was shortly to enter into a prolonged period of instability, triggered by a nearby supernova. Within a hundred years of our arrival, only one conceptus in thirty survived until term. Of those that were born, only about half were normal. We live long, by human standards, but we faced extinction unless the disaster could somehow be ameliorated."

  "You couldn't simply pack up and leave?"

  "Our Ship was a living organism. It died heroically when it brought us to Earth, making an intergalactic leap unprecedented in the history of our race . . . No, we could not leave. We had to find another solution. The Ship and its Spouse had chosen Earth for us because of a basic compatibility between our plasm and that of the highest native life-form, the ramapithecines. This enabled us to dominate them with our torc technology . . ."

  "To enslave them, you mean?"

  "Why use such a pejorative term, Bryan? Did your people speak of enslaving chimpanzees or whales? The ramas are scarcely more sentient. Or would you have had us live in a Stone Age culture? We came here voluntarily in order to follow an ancient lifestyle no longer permissible on the worlds of our galaxy. But we hardly desired to subsist on roots and berries or live in caves."

  "Perish the thought. So you made the ramas your servants and went your merry way until the sun went spotty. And then your genetic engineers found a new use for the ramas, I presume."

  "Don't equate our technology with your own, Bryan. At this late stage of our racial life we are very poor engineers, genetic, or otherwise. All we were able to do was utilize the rama females as planting beds for our fertilized ova. It increased our reproductive rate only slightly and was a lame expedient at best. You can see how the arrival of human time-travelers, genetically compatible and virtually immune to the effects of the radiation, would seem providential to us."

  "Oh, very. Still, you have to admit that the advantages are mostly one-sided."

  "Are you so certain of that? Recall what kind of misfit human beings make the decision to come to Exile. We Tanu have a great deal to offer them. Better things than they ever dreamed possible, if they possess latent metafunctions. And we really ask so little in return."

  Something came jabbing Elizabeth.

  Stop that.

  Jabjabjab.

  Go away.

  Jab. Jabjab. Come out help I've screwed it.

  Stop small pecking childmind Aiken.

  JAB!

  Vexing insect swat you Aiken! Bother someone else.

  JabscratchPOUND. Dammit Elizabeth she's going to bollix up STEIN.

  Slowly, Elizabeth turned in her saddle and stared at the rider next to her. Aiken's mind nattered on as she brought into focus a woman-form in dark flowing robes. Sukey. A tense face with plump cheeks and a button nose. Indigo eyes set too closely together for beauty, glazed with panic.

  Elizabeth went into her without invitation and grasped the situation in an instant, leaving Aiken and the late-arriving Creyn to watch from outside in helpless impotence. Sukey was in the grip of Stein's enraged mind, her sanity almost overwhelmed by the mental power of the wounded man. It was plain what had happened. Sukey was a potentially strong latent redactor and her new silver torc had made the metafunction operant. Egged on by Aiken, she had tested her ability by snooping into Stein, intrigued by the apparent helplessness of the sleeping giant. The young woman had slipped in beneath the low-level neural bath generated by the gray torc, which Creyn had set up to soothe the berserker and block out residual pain from his healing injuries. Under this lid, Sukey had seen the pitiful state of Stein's subconscious mind, the old psychic ulcerations, the newly torn rents in his self-esteem, all gurging about in a maelstrom of suppressed violence.

  The tempter had whispered to Sukey, and her innate compassion had responded. She had begun a hopelessly incompetent redact operation on Stein, confident that she could help him; but the brute resident in the pain-filled Viking soul had reared up and attacked her for her meddling. Now both Sukey and Stein were caught in a fearsome conflict of psychoenergies. If the antagonism were not promptly resolved, the outcome could be total personality disjunction for Stein and imbecility for the woman.

  Elizabeth sent one blazing thought to Creyn. She dove in and folded the great wings of her own redactability about the frenzied pair. The young woman mind was flung unceremoniously out, to be fielded by Creyn, who let Sukey down easily and then watched with a respect tinged by some other emotion as the mischief was undone.

  Elizabeth wove restraints, stopped the psychic whirlpool, calmed the heaving pit of fury. She plucked away the jerry-built mind-alteration structure confected by Sukey, with its naive and impudent drainage channels that were too puny for true catharsis. She bore Stein's damaged ego up with loving force while melting the edges of the wounds and pressing the torn parts back so that healing could begin. Even the older psychic abcesses swelled and burst and vented some of their poison through her. Humiliati
on and rejection diminished. The father-monster shrank toward pathetic humanity and the mother-lover lost some of her vesture of fantasy. Stein-Awakened looked into Elizabeth's mirror of healing and cried out. He rested.

  Elizabeth emerged.

  The party of riders had come to a halt, crowding closely around Elizabeth and her mount. She shivered in the sultry evening air. Creyn took his own soft scarlet-and-white cloak and draped it about her shoulders.

  "It was magnificent, Elizabeth. None of us, not even Lord Dionket, our greatest, could have done better. They are both safe."

  "It still isn't complete," she forced herself to say. "I can't finalize him. His will is very strong and he resists. This took, all I have now."

  Creyn touched the circle of gold about his neck. "I can deepen the neural envelope generated by his gray torc. Tonight, when we reach Roniah, we will be able to do more for him. He will recover in a few days."

  Stein, who had not once moved during the metapsychic imbroglio, uttered a vast sigh. The two soldiers dismounted and came to adjust his saddle cantle so that it became a high supporting backrest.

  "There's no danger of his falling now," Creyn said. "We'll make him more comfortable later. Now we had better ride on."

  Bryan demanded, "Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?" Lacking a torc, he had missed a great deal of the byplay, which had been telepathic.

  A stocky man with tow-colored hair and a vaguely Oriental cast to his features pointed a finger at Aiken Drum. "Ask that one. He started it."

  Aiken grinned and twiddled his silver torc. Several white moths appeared suddenly out of the darkness and began orbiting Sukey's head in a crazy halo. "Just a little do-goodery gone baddery!"

  "Stop that," Creyn commanded. The moths flew away. The tall Tanu addressed Aiken in a tone of veiled menace. "Sukey was the agent, but it is obvious that you were the instigator. You amused yourself by placing your friend and this inexperienced woman in mortal danger."

  Aiken's golliwog face was unrepentant "Ah. She seemed strong enough. Nobody forced her to mess with him."

  Sukey spoke up. Her voice had a ring of stubborn self-righteousness. "I was only trying to help. He was in desperate need! None of the rest of you seemed to care!"

  Creyn said with asperity, "This was not the time or the place to undertake a difficult redaction. Stein would have been treated in good time."

  "Let me get this straight," said Bryan. "She tried to alter his mind?"

  "She tried to heal him," Elizabeth said. "I suppose Aiken urged her to try out her new metabilities, just as he's been testing his own. But she couldn't handle it."

  "Stop talking about me as though I were a child!" Sukey exclaimed. "So I bit off more than I could chew. But I meant well!"

  There was a harsh laugh from the towhead, whose silver torc was nearly concealed by a plaid flannel shirt. He wore heavy twill trousers and woodsman's boots with lug soles. "You meant well! Some day that'll be humanity's epitaph! Even that damned Madame Guderian meant well when she let people pass into this hell-world."

  Creyn said, "It will be hell for you only if you make it so, Raimo. Now we must ride on. Elizabeth, if you feel able, would you help Sukey to understand something of her new power? At least advise her of the limitations she must accept for now."

  "I suppose I had better."

  Aiken rode close to scowling Sukey and patted her shoulder in a brotherly fashion. "There now, sweets. The past mistress of mind-bendery will give you a flash course, and then you can work on me! Iguarantee not to gobble you alive. We'll have lots of fun while you straighten out the kinks in my poor little evil soul!"

  Elizabeth's mind reached out and gave Aiken a tweak that made him squawk out loud. "Enough of you, my lad. Go practice working your will on bats or hedgehogs or something."

  "I'll give you bats," Aiken promised darkly. He urged his mount forward along the wide track, and the cavalcade began to move once more.

  Elizabeth opened to Sukey, gentling the woman's fear and discomfiture. I would like to help you. Little mindsister. Be at ease. Yes? (Bloody-minded stubborn chagrin breaking down slowly.) Oh why not. I did make a terrible hash of it.

  All over now. Relax Let me know you . . .

  Sue-Gwen Davies, aged twenty-seven, born and raised on the last of the Old World orbital colonies. A former juvenile officer full of sturdy empathy and maternal concern for her wretched young clients. The adolescents of the satellite had mounted an insurrection, rebelling against the unnatural life chosen for them by technocratic idealist grandparents, and the Milieu had belatedly ruled that the colony must be disbanded. Sukey Davies had rejoiced even as her job became redundant. She had no loyalty to the satellite, no philosophical commitment to the experiment that had become obsolete at the very moment that the Great Intervention commenced. All of Sukey's working hours had been spent trying to cope with children who stubbornly resisted the conditioning necessary for life in an orbiting beehive.

  When the satellite colony was terminated, Sukey came down to Earth, that world seen below for so many aching years. Paradise and peace existed down there. She was sure of it! Earth was Eden. But the real promised land was not to be found on Earth's manicured, busy continents.

  It was inside the planet.

  Elizabeth came up short. Sukey's mind was moderately intelligent, strong-willed, kindly, latent in high redactability and moderate farsense. But Sukey Davies was also firmly convinced that the planet Earth was hollow! Old-fashioned microfiche books smuggled onto the satellite by bored eccentrics and cultists had introduced her to the ideas of Bender and Giannini and Palmer and Bernard and Souza. Sukey had been enthralled by the notion of a hollow Earth lit by a small central sun, a land of tranquillity and invincible goodness, peopled by dwarfish gentlefolk possessing all wisdom and delight. Had not the ancients told tales of subterranean Asar, Avalon, the Elysian Fields, Ratmansu, and Ultima Thule? Even Buddhist Agharta was supposed to be connected by tunnels to the lamaseries of Tibet. These dreams seemed not at all outré to Sukey, the in habitant of the inside surface of a twenty-kilometer-long spinning cylinder in space. It was logical that Earth be hollow, too. So Sukey came down to the Old World, where people smiled as she explained what she was looking for. Quite a few helped relieve her of her severance pay as she pursued her quest. There were not, she discovered from expensive personal inspection, mirage-shielded polar apertures leading to the planetary interior, as claimed by some of the old writers; nor was she able to gain entrance to the underworld via the purported caves in Xizang. Finally she had gone to Brazil, where one author said there was a tunnel to Agharta located in the remote Serra do Roncador. An old Murcego Indian, sensing an additional gratuity, told her that the tunnel had indeed once existed; but unfortunately it had been closed by an earthquake "many thousands" of years in the past.

  Sukey pondered this pronouncement for three tearful weeks before concluding that she would surely be able to find the way into the hollow Earth by traveling back into time. She had dressed herself in robes reflecting her Welsh heritage and come eagerly to the Pliocene, where . . .

  Creyn says his people founded the paradise!

  Oh Sukey.

  Yes, yes! And I powerful healer can belong! Creyn's promise!

  Calm. You can become metapractitioner of stature. But not instantly. Much, much to learn dear. Trust listen follow then act.

  Want/need to. Poor Stein! Other poor ones I can help. Feeling them all around us do you feel too? . . .

  Elizabeth withdrew from the fidgeting immaturity of Sukey's mind and cast about. There was something. Something completely alien to her experience that had only glimmered on the fringes of her perception earlier in the evening. What was it? The enigma would not resolve itself into a mental image she could identify. Not yet. And so Elizabeth put the problem aside and returned to the task of instructing Sukey. The job was a difficult one that would keep her busy for quite some time, for which thanks be to God.

  Chapter Eight


  Bound for the River Rhône, the party rode for three more hours into the deepening night and coolness, coming down from the plateau via a steep trail with precarious switchbacks into a forest so thick that the bright light of the stars was blocked out. The two soldiers ignited tall flambeaux; one man rode in the van and the other at the rear. They continued their eastward progress while eerie shadows seemed to follow them among the massive gnarled trees.

  "Spooky, isn't it?" Aiken inquired of Raimo, who was now riding beside him. "Can't you just imagine these big old cork oaks and chestnuts reaching out to grab you?"

  "You talk like an idiot," the other man growled. "I worked in deep forests for twenty years in the B. C Megapod Reserve. Ain't nothing spooky about trees."

  Aiken was unabashed. "So that's why the lumberjack outfit. But if you know trees, you must know that botanists credit them with a primitive self-awareness. Don't you think that the older the plant, the more attuned to the Milieu it must be? Just look at these trees along here. Don't tell me they had hardwoods eight-ten meters across on the Earth we knew! Why, these babies must be thousands of years older than any tree on Old Earth. Just reach out to 'em! Use that silver torc of yours for something besides an Adam's apple warmer. Ancient trees . . . evil trees! Can't you feel the bad vibes in this forest? They could resent our coming here. They might sense that in a few million years, humans like us'll destroy 'em! Maybe the trees hate us!"

  "I think," said Raimo with slow malevolence, "that you're trying to make a fool outa me like you did with Sukey. Don't!"

  Aiken felt himself hoisted up from his saddle. His chained ankles caught him like a victim on a rack. Higher and higher he rose, until he was suspended dangerously close to the branches overhanging the trail.